


How To Say Sorry In Gallifreyan, And Why You Shouldn't.

by Lanna Michaels (lannamichaels)



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Amy Pond Is River Song, Author's Favorite, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-27
Updated: 2010-04-27
Packaged: 2017-10-09 05:10:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/83383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lannamichaels/pseuds/Lanna%20Michaels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You never do completely understand linear time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How To Say Sorry In Gallifreyan, And Why You Shouldn't.

**Author's Note:**

> Continuity/Canon: through Doctor Who 5.04 The Time of Angels

You don't really tell people you're an orphan. It means you have to be painfully specific. Whoever your birth mother was, she gave you up for adoption and vanished and the name on the paperwork never came to anything, not when your parents, your _real_ parents, tried to track her down when you pitched a fit before your fifth birthday party and demanded her presence. Your parents tried, you know they did, but couldn't find her. And then they'd orphaned you, again, and it seemed not worth the effort and utterly, completely wrong to make the point that you never had parents to begin with.

You're the only one who can hear the voice in your wall and maybe it's because of that, being a secret orphan. Once you start keeping secrets, you're more open to hearing other people's. Your aunt can't hear the voices, but you can.

The voice gets very insistent when the Doctor crashes and you run outside, hoping that the police have finally come to catch the prisoner. Instead, you see the box, meet the Doctor, and spend the rest of the night huddled in your coat against the cold, waiting for him to come back.

(The box does come back and a woman bends down and strokes your hair and you wake up inside, tucked under your covers, and your aunt shouts at you for having friends over for a sleepover without asking, and you forget about the red-headed woman because it's only another dream about your mum coming back to take care of you, and you are too old to still believe she will.)

You spend the next twelve years hovering between the dream world and the real world, and you prefer the dream world, with your crayons, then your markers, then your colored pencils, then your artful sketches. You have modeling clay and styrofoam and arts and crafts, and you construct the world of your dreams, with your mother and the Doctor and a magic box that can take you away, and meanwhile, you live your life in the real world and try to remember that it's the real one, not the fake. Sometimes, you forget.

The Doctor returns on a sunny day, which at first surprises you, because you have always dreamed him as something out of the nighttime. The Doctor is a creature of dreamtime, as far as you're concerned, but you soon start to see him as a creature of the daytime as well. He is different in the daylight, or perhaps it is only you who is different. It has been, after all, twelve years. You've grown up, you've grown cynical, and you take great joy in hitting him as hard as you can.

And then he rushes back to his time machine and it disappears before your eyes again and it's still a sunny day and he is still gone.

(The box does come back and a woman sneaks into the house, but you are not there, you are still sobbing your heart out on Rory's shoulder and he is patting your back soothingly, and then he is helping you give your statement to UNIT and then he is talking to them about working for their medical research team, and you are very calm and centered in your dream world, and Rory is still holding onto you, trying to keep you in this world, and you are grateful to him for it, because otherwise you might slip away into your dreams and never return. Meanwhile, the woman tip-toes through, picking up bits and pieces, and she steals your diary, the one you made in art class at camp when you were twelve, the one with the raised cover, the one you had kept safe and secure by completely forgetting where you had put it when you put it away last year when you had decided the time had come to put away childish things, and the woman leaves your house quickly and silently and you never knew she was there.)

As far as you're concerned, being a Time Lord means the Doctor doesn't have to care about anybody's personal sense of linear time. You have a timeline, from beginning to end, and he must as well, except that his must be convoluted and a bit of a pretzel. UNIT wants to know everything, and in exchange, they give you access to a small portion of their files about him. You put together a collage for yourself of his faces, so you will know him if you ever see him again, any of the hims. The order they're in has a question mark near it and so you arrange and rearrange them, like a game of memory or a stack of cards. Mixing and matching. You call it a game of self-preservation. If you ever see him again, you want to slap him so hard he sees all of time and space explode behind his eyelids.

(To understand linear time requires that you first understand a line and the concept of one dimension, and then to understand time and the concept of four. Everything that is happening is happening now and has happened already and everyone is being born and everyone is dying, and somewhere in the stars, you are traveling with the Doctor and somewhere in the stars, you are being born.)

The Doctor returns again at night and that is fitting, because he may not be a creature of it, but he was born of it. UNIT has dated your encounter with him as the first in this regeneration's chronology, helped by your description of the healing energy he had breathed into the night air like fairy dust. You had met the man moments after he had solidified into a form and that knowledge makes you feel oddly like a mother to him, but what are you thinking, you were seven. He protected you, he sealed your wall, he brought the monsters down on you, and you are not his mother, you were only present at his birth. But it weighs on you and you catch yourself looking at him, wondering how old he is, how old _this_ he is, because he has been alive to you for fourteen years and to himself, barely days.

(You never do completely understand linear time.)

The Doctor opens the TARDIS doors with a snap of his fingers and he tempts you away, but you were always going to go, you decided that a long time ago, sitting on your suitcase in the garden, listening intently to the surrounding darkness, praying for the swirling lights. The Doctor takes you traveling and you start to record it on scraps of paper that you find in the TARDIS library. When you are looking for the paper, you find an old diary, the covers torn off, and before you can rummage through, because the Doctor has said you can read anything that will let you read it and the TARDIS knows what you shouldn't, the Doctor's hands come out from behind you and snatch it away.

He looks almost sheepish. "Um, not this, not yet." He holds it behind his back and gives the walls of the room a sharp look. "What are you trying to do? That was naughty."

As far as you're concerned, if the TARDIS want you to read something, that's either the best reason in the world to read it, or the best reason in the world to never want to read it, ever. The Doctor saves you the choice by slipping the book into one of his pockets. It disappears into that controlled black hole, as you have taken to thinking of it. Or perhaps it should be Schrödinger's pocket. Once things go in there, they don't exist until the Doctor needs them to exist.

"I kind of, um, went back and stole this," the Doctor says sheepishly. "When I shouldn't have. But I was keeping it safe for a friend, I swear."

The TARDIS changes the lights in the room and you tense a little, still not used to living inside a living spaceship, but the Doctor only tsks and starts talking to the walls in earnest in a language you don't understand. It sounds like an argument. It sounds like the Doctor is losing.

(You learn Gallifreyan from Jack Harkness, but that is an entire story unto itself and it involves a year that didn't happen, the Master, the Doctor, more Time Lord politics than you can keep straight in your head, and the way you ended up getting your own time-traveling spaceship and license to pilot it. Sometimes you catch yourself idly sketching it out in triangles and squares and circles with a stick onto beach sand and you watch it wash away with the tide and you think, good riddance to Gallifrey, and feel like a traitor to the Doctor, but it doesn't matter, none of it, because you have finally rid the Doctor of things he does not thank you for, and when you see him again, it is two faces ahead of the last time you'd seen him, when he had been thundering at you, with your name on your lips and his name on his lips, and the crack in space and time finally sealed, and you had closed the Medusa Cascade, you and your Doctor, and two of him from before, and you had finally been free of your first parents and the past that you never had, because the Doctor had saved you and taken you to Scotland and then taken you with him to the stars, all so you could be here, do this, and be shunned by the Doctor, and you never do understand linear time because your entire life is an ontological paradox and you owe your dreams to the darkness that is space and time.)

There are times when life on the TARDIS is slow and it seems like a journey is taking a while, and you and the Doctor start talking about things unrelated to the latest life-threatening crisis. You talk about watching the Indiana Jones films for the first time as being a major point in your childhood, you talk about heartbreak when you discovered what archaeology was really like, and the Doctor promises to take you to a museum where you can see amazing artifacts and hear amazing stories, and he does. He takes you to five, all trips squeezed in between great adventures. This is where you catch your breath between marathon sessions of running for your life, this is where you discover just how much is out there and how to ask the Doctor to take you there, this is where the Doctor seems even smugger and more arrogant than usual.

He shows off like a ringmaster at a circus, strutting around, and you laugh at him and enjoy yourself, despite the fact that after this many museums, you are ready to do some more running. And running is what you get, running to the TARDIS, running to coordinates that put you nowhere in particular, and then the Doctor expands the TARDIS air shell and opens the door and a woman falls on top of him.

(Later, you laugh. You laugh _so hard_.)

The woman takes you down to a planet and you walk along a beach and the Doctor and the woman talk. Her name is River Song and she is not yet a professor, but she is a Doctor, a Doctor of something, and she is wearing clothes that are not at all practical for walking along the beach and then she pulls out a diary and for a moment, that is all you can see, and then you look up at her and she winks and she goes on talking to the Doctor like there is nothing going on in the universe other than homicidal angel statues that aren't statues at all and you are to keep yourself safe in the TARDIS but you don't, because enough of keeping yourself safe, you are in this for the adventure and the risk and you know enough already about how linear time just simply isn't and how timelines get rewritten all the time to think yourself indestructible now, but it does help, knowing. Even if it's not _your_ timeline, not the timeline you yourself experience, it did happen, and it will, even if you mess things up, there's a version of you out there, flirting with the Doctor, and of course you have to ask if you are ever stupid enough to marry him, because there are some burning gossip desires that can never be truly quashed by common sense, and maybe the Doctor just isn't seeing it, because he doesn't comment on it at all.

And, of course, he has to know.

(He does; he only expresses surprise that it took you just a glance at a diary. "A diary, of all things! Everyone has a diary! Your sainted aunt has a diary!" Yes, you respond, but no one else has the diary I made when I was twelve and still had a crush on Tom Phillips from down the block. The Doctor sputters and waves his finger at you and orders you to say not a word, but you go back anyway and get the diary and you transfer all the notes you've been taking so far into it, and there it is, your diary. The Doctor orders you to never let him see what's inside, and you promise you never will, except that you know he already has it, and can read it at any time, because there's Diary Now and Diary Future and Diary Future resides securely in the Doctor's pocket, and Diary Now gets battered and tattered and dropped on the floor and you begin to understand why the TARDIS wanted you to read it, because then you'd know what had happened in one timeline and could fashion yourself a new one, a specific timeline for this you, you could make different choices and come to different conclusions, but then the Doctor may never get your diary and you would never have almost read it because the TARDIS left it out for you. And you do try to avoid your life becoming more of a timeline pretzel than it already is, you don't need it forking as well.)

It's a bit funny, actually, all three of you knowing it and none of you saying it, but that's one thing you've learned about the Doctor. For all that he can talk forever and a day, there are things he doesn't say and things he won't mention, and you know that causality isn't a joke. You aren't here to swap gossip with your future self, although you do wonder if the Doctor does with his. You wonder if they compare notes or diaries, try to match up with each other, or maybe they stay as far away from each other as possible. You are starting to think about time as merely distances and while most people trudge forward, one step at a time, you zip along on a bicycle, backwards and forwards, seeing the sights, occasionally carrying the mail. You have started to think of times as places you visit, and you see the number line the way you used to see house numbers on unfamiliar streets. Time is not the hands on a clock, time is a destination, time is a place, time is something you can visit, something you can almost touch.

(You seal your name in the Cascade and when you take the new one, you tell Rory it's to keep within the aquatic theme. It's only another ontological paradox, and what's one more when you've already flown the TARDIS when the Doctor was too sick with time fluctuations to hold his head up without vomiting up another regeneration because you taught yourself how, already stole your diary because you already did, and comforted yourself as a child simply because you could. You are River Song because you already were, because you always will be, because time is always all at once and you are Amy Pond and River Song and never Amelia, because that belongs to the vortex now, kept safe and secret forever.)

When it is all over and done with, you fly away with the Doctor and he takes you home, because once you have seen your future, it is time to deal with the past and take care of it like a seedling plant, and you marry Rory and you go off on your honeymoon and the Doctor arrives in the middle. He declares your destination to be utterly boring and completely devoid of interesting people to meet and governments to overthrow, so he takes you and Rory up into the stars, and you fall more in love with Rory than ever before, and the Doctor sometimes shivers and shudders and weaves the TARDIS into things, and you tell Rory this is completely normal. The Doctor isn't safe, he's not a tour guide, he thrives on trouble and terror and fear. Rory's always been your safety anchor, he keeps you grounded and in one place, and to see him in the TARDIS is to see him try to ground the ungroundable, to see him bring the normal into the abnormal.

The Doctor takes you on a voyage of discovery and Rory seems to both hate it and love it, not in the same way you do, but he hates seeing people hurt, and one day you walk into the kitchen to find the Doctor and Rory having a heavy conversation about seeing people die and not being able to do anything to help, and you have always understood deep down why Rory left the hospital and turned to research only, but it bubbles up then and you see it right there before you, that Rory hates being powerless to stop death, that he wants to be proactive, not reactive, and you tip-toe away because this moment is for the medics only, and when Rory comes to find you later, you are sitting by the swimming pool, dipping your toes in the water, and you tell him you love him and you mean it more than you ever have before.

(One day, the Doctor gets an emergency beacon signal and drops you and Rory off on earth and orders you to be good and here's what to do if he never gets back to you, because that's a possibility and this is very dangerous, and you nod and kiss him on his cheek as he leaves, and you and Rory get all of six hours into your second honeymoon before you hear the TARDIS again and the Doctor stumbles out, still the same Doctor as before but with lines around his eyes that weren't there six hours ago, and he tells you that he's crossing his own timeline, but the your-immediate-timeline him won't be back for a while, so he's here to say, enjoy this, enjoy each other, and he hesitates and says, don't go into the forest, for god's sake, don't go into the forest, things live there which cannot easily die, and their prisoners lose all hope of rescue, and the Doctor presses his hands against your cheekbones and jaw and you can feel him in your head saying, _I'm so sorry, but this is going to hurt_, and whatever he does, it has to work, because when your Doctor returns, six months later, he hands you a stiletto heel and tells you everything is going to be fine and you believe him.)

You are okay with your life being a problem of space and time that requires a solution, but you have read too many science fiction books as a child and so when you get pregnant, you make the Doctor leave you on earth and not come back until the child is school-age, and you meet Sarah Jane Smith, who comes by one day and says the Doctor asked her to look in on you and give you this, and she hands you a note and a baby blanket with odd shapes and designs and it takes you a moment to recognize it as English and another for the shapes to coalesce into words and ideas and the coordinates of a pinpointed moment in spacetime about two months and the nearest maternity ward away, and then you smile and you read it aloud to Rory and he hugs you, and your baby comes right on time, birth timed down to the microsecond, and life with a pretzel timeline isn't so bad, you think. It's certainly worked out fine for you.

(The Doctor comes back, as he always does, and when he hands you his screwdriver, a part of you knows, _this is my death_. You go on anyway.)


End file.
